AMD CPU speculation... and expert conjecture

[esrever]

There is next to no reason to ever wait for new cpu gen any more unless you are already confident in what you got and want to see stuff in long term. Performance in CPU have been moving so slowly that it basically been at a standstill since the 2500k. Haswell, Broadwell, Skylake, it doesn't even really matter. If you need something, then buy it. If you are tired of waiting for AMD, you'd be pretty tired of waiting on intel too because nothing coming is going to be mind blowing its all incremental.

I have no idea why anyone would wait for Zen unless they are just waiting to see if it is going to be good and they currently have no reason to upgrade. If you aren't happy with what you have now, then get something new. Prices and performance have been stagnant and it doesn't look like it will move unless Zen happens to be amazing, which probably won't be the case.

Skylake looks like it won't bring anything great, especially since it looks like intel will sell broadwell chips at the same time as skylake. Going by the leaked timeline, it will be only a few month between broadwell and skylake. Then again, Skylake could be delayed till next year so who knows.

 

[jdwii]

yeah i can agree to that only in some cases newer models might be faster.

 

[juanrga]

x86 performance in CPU have been moving so slowly because x86 is at its limits. Zen will not change that. There is a wall. x86 is a non-scalable ISA.

non-x86 performance in CPU has been moving very fast: ARM increases 30--50% IPC per gen, and Haswell CPUs are about 70% faster clock for clock than Ivy Bridge CPUs on AVX software

http://www.pugetsystems.com/blog/2013/08/26/Haswell-Floating-Point-Performance-493/

Skylake will bring another 70% or more on top of Broadwell.

 

[etayorius]

CPU wise with Intel, you won't notice earth shattering differences in games from Sandy and up.

Cheers!

Agree, but i am at PhenomII and moving to Skylake should be up to 80% faster at least.

Haha, sorry; the answer turned out to be cryptic. That happens when you need to do something in a hurry and press "answer"

Anyway, what I meant is any Intel K cpu will do a great job at replacing your Phenom II (i5 or i7, even for the X platform). No need to wait for a certain specific gen to come out. What's already out is very good and you won't see big enough differences to regret your purchase. This is from someone who was waiting for the FX8350 to arrive at Microcenter the day before traveling back to his home country, when they slapped the "50% off + 100USD discount on any Asus MoBo" combo on top of the i7 2700K, hahaha. Man... That happens few times in life, haha.

Cheers!

Fair enough, thoug i been waiting almost 4 years and i can definitely wait till Skylake arrives for more future proof.

 

[FALC0N]

Zen is a little different than some of the other projects mentioned here. It will be the first truly new design since Rory Reed too over in 2012. That's significant, as everything we have seen so far has been making the best of what they have. Which isn't much.

Zen will be the first real test of the new management. Yes, they have let us down in the past. But they still deserve a chance to prove they can deliver.

I think they have done pretty well the last 3 years, given the slop they started with. AMD's position circa 2012 was horrible. The only thing I would have done differently is released an AM3+ version of steamroller/excavator.

 

[esrever]

AM3+ steamroller/excavator don't really make sense any more because they are both mobile focused designs. It would mean releasing new 95W cpus that perform like the 125W piledriver ones but having them not even OC as high and it would end up pointless for the desktop space for most people. They won't be closing the gap with intel and it would cost them R&D as well as making them look bad for making chips that are no faster than the previous gen.

They could go the more core rout but I don't think many people are looking at AMD and thinking: I want more AMD cores in 1 cpu.

 

[jdwii]

CPU wise with Intel, you won't notice earth shattering differences in games from Sandy and up.

Cheers!

Agree, but i am at PhenomII and moving to Skylake should be up to 80% faster at least.

Haha, sorry; the answer turned out to be cryptic. That happens when you need to do something in a hurry and press "answer"

Anyway, what I meant is any Intel K cpu will do a great job at replacing your Phenom II (i5 or i7, even for the X platform). No need to wait for a certain specific gen to come out. What's already out is very good and you won't see big enough differences to regret your purchase. This is from someone who was waiting for the FX8350 to arrive at Microcenter the day before traveling back to his home country, when they slapped the "50% off + 100USD discount on any Asus MoBo" combo on top of the i7 2700K, hahaha. Man... That happens few times in life, haha.

Cheers!

Fair enough, thoug i been waiting almost 4 years and i can definitely wait till Skylake arrives for more future proof.

I had a rig like yours not sure what you do but for normal things that system must be super fast and i can tell the little stuff. For newer games its probably getting hard for you in some titles but upgrading wouldn't help if your looking at the FX i know if you moved to a haswell quad core you would notice quite a difference in min frames. Then again you own a 470 which is close to a 7850 (http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_GTX_680/27.html)

 

[jdwii]

The last thing i wanted in my Amd fx was more cores lol. Esrever is making complete since here. I myself think Zen will be around Sandy level single core performance with 8 cores and 95 watt TDP. Not bad really if you need the extra cores but like i don't need 32GB of ram i won't need more cores but i need more single core performance always. Even more so when even my I7 haswell is getting pushed in some things.

 

[de5_Roy]

Mantle is a Vulkan: AMD's dead graphics API rises from the ashes in OpenGL's successor
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2894036/mantle-is-a-vulkan-amds-dead-graphics-api-rises-from-the-ashes-as-opengls-successor.html
lot of these chicken-or-teh-egg word plays going on. amd rejoices because mantle is vulkan, nvidia downplays mantle's contribution, 3rd party analysts being cautiously optimistic, and so on.

Gaming hardware market worth $67 billion in 2014, PCs dominate
http://hexus.net/gaming/news/industry/81424-gaming-hardware-market-worth-67-billion-2014-pcs-dominate/
moar word plays.

 

[FALC0N]

AM3+ steamroller/excavator don't really make sense any more because they are both mobile focused designs. It would mean releasing new 95W cpus that perform like the 125W piledriver ones but having them not even OC as high and it would end up pointless for the desktop space for most people.

Steamroller improved IPC over Vishera as much as Visher did over Zambezi. It also used less power and still could clock to about 4.4 GHZ, which is good enough for 99 percent of users. . Excavator improves the situation even further.

So yes, it would definitely be a worthwhile upgrade. It wouldn't overtake intel, but a 15-20 percent IPC improvement and lower power would make it a much more compelling product.

 

[etayorius]

CPU wise with Intel, you won't notice earth shattering differences in games from Sandy and up.

Cheers!

Agree, but i am at PhenomII and moving to Skylake should be up to 80% faster at least.

Haha, sorry; the answer turned out to be cryptic. That happens when you need to do something in a hurry and press "answer"

Anyway, what I meant is any Intel K cpu will do a great job at replacing your Phenom II (i5 or i7, even for the X platform). No need to wait for a certain specific gen to come out. What's already out is very good and you won't see big enough differences to regret your purchase. This is from someone who was waiting for the FX8350 to arrive at Microcenter the day before traveling back to his home country, when they slapped the "50% off + 100USD discount on any Asus MoBo" combo on top of the i7 2700K, hahaha. Man... That happens few times in life, haha.

Cheers!

Fair enough, thoug i been waiting almost 4 years and i can definitely wait till Skylake arrives for more future proof.

I had a rig like yours not sure what you do but for normal things that system must be super fast and i can tell the little stuff. For newer games its probably getting hard for you in some titles but upgrading wouldn't help if your looking at the FX i know if you moved to a haswell quad core you would notice quite a difference in min frames. Then again you own a 470 which is close to a 7850 (http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_GTX_680/27.html)

I use my PC Mostly for gaming (95%), so I can only run games such as DAI with Medium Setting at 35/45 FPS, Most Wanted Runs on High at 45/60, Rivals at Medium but game is locked at 30 as default, BF3 does run at Very High, BF4 runs at 40 max at high, GTA4 runs mostly at 40/50, Shadows of Mordor only at Medium and Watch Dogs barely at Medium all of them at 1440x1080 Resolution. My monitor supports from 1280x1024 to 2560×1920 and is only 4:3 Ratio, i cannot game at anything Higher, Strangely enough Skyrim works quite good since i can run it at a constant 60 at Ultra Detail at 1600x1200 but i cant use ENBs because even the "Performance Editions" drop my frames to 34 AVG so yeah my system can't keep up, and i think the HD7850 is about 10/15% faster than the GTX470, i am also running the PhenomII at 4GHZ and cannot push past that, i got one of the bad OC Batch.

My next most wanted RPG title will be Witcher3 which i am sure i will not be able to run it at even medium settings, so i urgently need an upgrade, heck even the 2500K stock is like 15% Faster than my PhenomII OCed to 4GHZ.

 

[jdwii]

AM3+ steamroller/excavator don't really make sense any more because they are both mobile focused designs. It would mean releasing new 95W cpus that perform like the 125W piledriver ones but having them not even OC as high and it would end up pointless for the desktop space for most people.

Steamroller improved IPC over Vishera as much as Visher did over Zambezi. It also used less power and still could clock to about 4.4 GHZ, which is good enough for 99 percent of users. . Excavator improves the situation even further.

So yes, it would definitely be a worthwhile upgrade. It wouldn't overtake intel, but a 15-20 percent IPC improvement and lower power would make it a much more compelling product.

Dude steamroller isn't anywhere close to a 20% upgrade in IPC over piledriver not sure why people think this when the majority of benchmarks claim otherwise.

 

[jdwii]

CPU wise with Intel, you won't notice earth shattering differences in games from Sandy and up.

Cheers!

Agree, but i am at PhenomII and moving to Skylake should be up to 80% faster at least.

Haha, sorry; the answer turned out to be cryptic. That happens when you need to do something in a hurry and press "answer"

Anyway, what I meant is any Intel K cpu will do a great job at replacing your Phenom II (i5 or i7, even for the X platform). No need to wait for a certain specific gen to come out. What's already out is very good and you won't see big enough differences to regret your purchase. This is from someone who was waiting for the FX8350 to arrive at Microcenter the day before traveling back to his home country, when they slapped the "50% off + 100USD discount on any Asus MoBo" combo on top of the i7 2700K, hahaha. Man... That happens few times in life, haha.

Cheers!

Fair enough, thoug i been waiting almost 4 years and i can definitely wait till Skylake arrives for more future proof.

I had a rig like yours not sure what you do but for normal things that system must be super fast and i can tell the little stuff. For newer games its probably getting hard for you in some titles but upgrading wouldn't help if your looking at the FX i know if you moved to a haswell quad core you would notice quite a difference in min frames. Then again you own a 470 which is close to a 7850 (http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_GTX_680/27.html)

I use my PC Mostly for gaming (95%), so I can only run games such as DAI with Medium Setting at 35/45 FPS, Most Wanted Runs on High at 45/60, Rivals at Medium but game is locked at 30 as default, BF3 does run at Very High, BF4 runs at 40 max at high, GTA4 runs mostly at 40/50, Shadows of Mordor only at Medium and Watch Dogs barely at Medium all of them at 1440x1080 Resolution. My monitor supports from 1280x1024 to 2560×1920 and is only 4:3 Ratio, i cannot game at anything Higher, Strangely enough Skyrim works quite good since i can run it at a constant 60 at Ultra Detail at 1600x1200 but i cant use ENBs because even the "Performance Editions" drop my frames to 34 AVG so yeah my system can't keep up, and i think the HD7850 is about 10/15% faster than the GTX470, i am also running the PhenomII at 4GHZ and cannot push past that, i got one of the bad OC Batch.

My next most wanted RPG title will be Witcher3 which i am sure i will not be able to run it at even medium settings, so i urgently need an upgrade, heck even the 2500K stock is like 15% Faster than my PhenomII OCed to 4GHZ.

Man even haswell would make a big difference but skylake should be even better. Yeah i made lots of benchmarks the 8350 is around 45% slower per clock then a Haswell core on average, some cases more or less. I did notice with the 8350 my games performed around 15-20% better(then my 1100T at 3.9ghz) but nothing worth upgrading to wasted my money. I feel bad for a lot of people who did the same.

 

[FALC0N]

Dude steamroller isn't anywhere close to a 20% upgrade in IPC over piledriver not sure why people think this when the majority of benchmarks claim otherwise.

And if I had said steamroller, that would mean something. I didn't. I said Steamroller AND Excavator. And they should combine to hit a 15 to 20 percent IPC increase over Vishera.

A 4ghz, 95 watt, Excavator FX would perform at the level of a 5ghz+ Zambezi, while using a whole lot less power. Bulldozer may be a crap arch, but it has come a long way in the last 3 years. I think that's chip worth making.

 

[Reynod]

AMD can't extract the performance (latency and prefetch efficiency) or size (heat/power) from their current cache designs ... so moving forward they are reducing the size of it to focus better on areas where they can make some wins. This is because Intel has long held the lead in this important area ... feeding the cores so they do not sit idle when work is needed to be done. This is the key area where Intel holds the lead, because it effects IPC broadly.

Palladin ... how does that sit with you?

 

[Reynod]

N00b ... no personal attacks ... remember last time? I think I sent you to the bleachers for 14 days. Be nice ... don't bite the other kids in the sandpit.

first off its only 20% when your comparing a factory oc 980 to a stock 290x, but juan wants to cry because no one wants to listen to him.

 

[Reynod]

truegenius ... your complaint has been heard and considered.

Let me point out that publically attacking a moderator is poor form In a thread ... hence why your post was deleted.

However ... since you started it here we will end it here.

Palladin is about as vicious as a wombat sleeping ... and far from being a fanboi.

Hell ... I'm more of a fanboi than he is ...

Please continue your discussions about the present topic ... all is well ... pigs are flying at 40,000 feet.

 

[juanrga]

Zen is a little different than some of the other projects mentioned here. It will be the first truly new design since Rory Reed too over in 2012. That's significant, as everything we have seen so far has been making the best of what they have. Which isn't much.

Zen is, as Bulldozer, a new arch from scratch. A new hope for the company. Piledriver was a kind of fix, and Steamroller and Excavator were evolutions of the arch.

Zen will be the first real test of the new management. Yes, they have let us down in the past. But they still deserve a chance to prove they can deliver.

Any bet that when Zen comes and it is not a Skylake killer, don't give AMD lots of money and don't give AMD the 80% of the market, I will be hearing something like:

"Hey, Zen was a first attempt, wait for post-Zen it will fix everything and will deliver the promises."

I think they have done pretty well the last 3 years, given the slop they started with. AMD's position circa 2012 was horrible. The only thing I would have done differently is released an AM3+ version of steamroller/excavator.

Not a chance. The size of the market would purchase an AM3+ version of steamroller/excavator is 0.01% or so. The cancellation of servers based in Steamroller/Excavator implied cancellation of AM3+, because HEDT alone is not economically viable.

Zen will be released in servers, and thus a HEDT version will come to 'AM4' (the real name of the socket is other).

Mantle is a Vulkan: AMD's dead graphics API rises from the ashes in OpenGL's successor
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2894036/mantle-is-a-vulkan-amds-dead-graphics-api-rises-from-the-ashes-as-opengls-successor.html
lot of these chicken-or-teh-egg word plays going on. amd rejoices because mantle is vulkan, nvidia downplays mantle's contribution, 3rd party analysts being cautiously optimistic, and so on.

The article confirms that Mantle is dead, despite AMD claims otherwsise and confirms that Vulkan is not Mantle (but has parts from Mantle).

You claim that nvidia is downplaying mantle's contribution, but you don't mention that the downplay is coming from Neil Trevett, the president of the Kronos group:

"Many companies have contributed to Vulkan and SPIR-V—Mantle gave us a tremendous head start—but Vulkan is definitely a working group design now," Trevett said. "Multiple hardware companies demonstrated early Vulkan drivers at GDC - including Imagination, Intel, and Nvidia—ARM also reported on their driver performance."

Trevett also added that although developers writing for Vulkan will need more resources over OpenGL initially, that will change as libraries and tools are added to it.

 

[FALC0N]

juanrga wrote:

Any bet that when Zen comes and it is not a Skylake killer, don't give AMD lots of money and don't give AMD the 80% of the market, I will be hearing something like:

"Hey, Zen was a first attempt, wait for post-Zen it will fix everything and will deliver the promises."

Depends on whether Zen does enough to deserve the benefit of the doubt. Its unrealistic to expect a huge jump in one generation. It IS realistic to expect a significant improvement. We will see.

However, it is the first project from this team. I'm not so quick to throw them to the wolves. They have done a lot with someone else's trash. lets see what they can do with a project of their own.

Not a chance. The size of the market would purchase an AM3+ version of steamroller/excavator is 0.01% or so. The cancellation of servers based in Steamroller/Excavator implied cancellation of AM3+, because HEDT alone is not economically viable.

Zen will be released in servers, and thus a HEDT version will come to 'AM4' (the real name of the socket is other).

Not a chance what? I didn't say they were going to release one. I said I would have. Or at least on FM2+. The FX didn't have to be AM3+, but it would have been a nice gesture to the people who purchased those boards.

The market would have been bigger than 0.01. Your just making up numbers.

 

[de5_Roy]

@mods: can you tag this thread to "amd" and "cpus"? i tried a couple of times, i get errors.

You claim that nvidia is downplaying mantle's contribution, but you don't mention that the downplay is coming from Neil Trevett, the president of the Kronos group

really? i just... can't believe you'd miss that part from the article:

Neil Trevett, the president of the Khronos Group, and an executive with Nvidia (v.p. of mobile division actually(loadz of teh moniez)), also downplayed any advantage any company had at this point.

brand affiliation is thicker (even though he has worked at khronos slightly longer)....
since we're throwing quotes, might as well post this too:

One thing's for sure, while Nvidia ignored Mantle it can’t ignore Vulkan, which will become the de facto alternative cross-platform API to DirectX.

this is where amd's contribution cannot be ignored. it got industry heavyweights move their lazy, innovation-stunting butts so quickly to develop vulkan and dx12.

 

[palladin9479]

AMD can't extract the performance (latency and prefetch efficiency) or size (heat/power) from their current cache designs ... so moving forward they are reducing the size of it to focus better on areas where they can make some wins. This is because Intel has long held the lead in this important area ... feeding the cores so they do not sit idle when work is needed to be done. This is the key area where Intel holds the lead, because it effects IPC broadly.

Palladin ... how does that sit with you?

That's pretty much the long and short of it. Integer math isn't hard and there really isn't much you can do to make it any faster on a per unit level, so instead they focus on prefetching and simultaneous processing those instructions. Intel absolutely dominates in that arena, nobody else in the industry can compete with their prefetching and caching logic. AMD has powerful GPU technology they acquired when the bought ATI so they have a significant advantage over both Intel and NVidia in the arena of integrated products and they are looking to leverage that into area's where it matters most. Time will see if they can be successful or not, gonna take Intel at least another three years to develop cost effective graphics that are on par with AMD.

 

[juanrga]

juanrga wrote:

Any bet that when Zen comes and it is not a Skylake killer, don't give AMD lots of money and don't give AMD the 80% of the market, I will be hearing something like:

"Hey, Zen was a first attempt, wait for post-Zen it will fix everything and will deliver the promises."

Depends on whether Zen does enough to deserve the benefit of the doubt. Its unrealistic to expect a huge jump in one generation. It IS realistic to expect a significant improvement. We will see.

However, it is the first project from this team. I'm not so quick to throw them to the wolves. They have done a lot with someone else's trash. lets see what they can do with a project of their own.

I expect Zen core to have ~40% better IPC (integer) than Piledriver and twice bigger FPU. I think this is realistic according to the little info I have about the arch. However, certain AMD engineer did claim that the goal is "100% higher IPC than Piledriver". This is the same kind of claims made during Bulldozer.

Not a chance. The size of the market would purchase an AM3+ version of steamroller/excavator is 0.01% or so. The cancellation of servers based in Steamroller/Excavator implied cancellation of AM3+, because HEDT alone is not economically viable.

Zen will be released in servers, and thus a HEDT version will come to 'AM4' (the real name of the socket is other).

Not a chance what? I didn't say they were going to release one. I said I would have. Or at least on FM2+. The FX didn't have to be AM3+, but it would have been a nice gesture to the people who purchased those boards.

The market would have been bigger than 0.01. Your just making up numbers.

And I said that the chance of AMD following your advice/desire was exactly zero because was economically inviable. The "0.01% or so" comes from AMD sales of FX (AM3+) chips.

 

[juanrga]

You claim that nvidia is downplaying mantle's contribution, but you don't mention that the downplay is coming from Neil Trevett, the president of the Kronos group

really? i just... can't believe you'd miss that part from the article:

Neil Trevett, the president of the Khronos Group, and an executive with Nvidia (v.p. of mobile division actually(loadz of teh moniez)), also downplayed any advantage any company had at this point.

brand affiliation is thicker (even though he has worked at khronos slightly longer)....

When he presented Vulkan to everyone he is talking as president of the Khronos Group, not as Nvidia executive. You said that downplay was coming from Nvidia, when in reality it is just Khronos Group saying the truth.

What he said coincides with what other companies of the Group were saying the presentation day. This is from Imagination:

Imagination is proud to have been a major contributor to the new Vulkan standard. With this new API alongside OpenGL ES, we feel that Khronos now has the right set of APIs in place to address the extreme performance and mainstream ends of the graphics programming market,” said Peter McGuinness, director of technology marketing, Imagination Technologies.

The bold font is from mine.

since we're throwing quotes, might as well post this too:

One thing's for sure, while Nvidia ignored Mantle it can’t ignore Vulkan, which will become the de facto alternative cross-platform API to DirectX.

this is where amd's contribution cannot be ignored. it got industry heavyweights move their lazy, innovation-stunting butts so quickly to develop vulkan and dx12.

Nvidia was originally interested

http://www.eteknix.com/nvidia-asked-amd-mantle-montreal-event/

then latter lose any interest because DX12 would render "Mantle obsolete and unnecessary"

http://www.lazygamer.net/general-news/nvidia-no-benefit-to-using-amds-mantle/

which is true. Of course Nvidia cannot ignore Vulkan just as did not ignore OpenGL. This is Nvidia statement at Kronos Group site

NVIDIA is a strong supporter of OpenGL and we are actively engaged in the development of Vulkan,” said Barthold Lichtenbelt, senior director of Tegra graphics software at NVIDIA. “Vulkan’s focus on enabling portable, high-performance games and engines will drive cutting-edge content across the range of NVIDIA’s gaming platforms including PC, mobile and cloud.

https://www.khronos.org/news/press/khronos-reveals-vulkan-api-for-high-efficiency-graphics-and-compute-on-gpus

 

[FALC0N]

I expect Zen core to have ~40% better IPC (integer) than Piledriver and twice bigger FPU. I think this is realistic according to the little info I have about the arch. However, certain AMD engineer did claim that the goal is "100% higher IPC than Piledriver". This is the same kind of claims made during Bulldozer.

If they can pull off a 40% IPC improvement, it would be a huge win. It close the gap with intel considerably. But I would be surprised if they hit 40 on the first generation.

 

[etayorius]

I expect Zen core to have ~40% better IPC (integer) than Piledriver and twice bigger FPU. I think this is realistic according to the little info I have about the arch. However, certain AMD engineer did claim that the goal is "100% higher IPC than Piledriver". This is the same kind of claims made during Bulldozer.

If they can pull off a 40% IPC improvement, it would be a huge win. It close the gap with intel considerably. But I would be surprised if they hit 40 on the first generation.

40% more IPC compared to Piledriver sounds realistic, anything more is pure vapor and wishful thinking.